I try and do an update once a year where I kind of check-in on the current state of the website. Last year told a similar story to the year before, costs had increased, ad revenue had decreased, and supporter revenue was solid and growing.
The past year is not that much different. Ad revenue is what it is and the new normal. It’s at least steady now. And membership revenue is the reason we are able to keep publishing. In almost every week supporting revenue is 2x-3x ad revenue.
The website’s costs have remained flat this year. I was able to put off upgrading any of the servers last year, but the forum server’s hard drive space is creeping upward (we’re now around 65% full, mostly from image attachments). In the next year I’ll probably need to offload some of these images to a secondary storage solution. Which will probably have an additional monthly cost.
Below are the last 52 weeks of revenue for the website—ad revenue in blue, supporter revenue in green. The big green spikes you see are the main recurring annual renewals each year. One is right around when I write this post each year, another is around the time when the website first launched, and the others are around the end of the year and previous site update posts.
First, a massive thank you to everyone who continues to visit the website and support us every month. If you’re already a member, I greatly appreciate you every single month when the renewals come in. It is because of all of you that I am able to keep the website online, dedicate time to updating it with news each day, and spend time making it better.
If you’re not yet a supporting member, and you like this website, this is my yearly pitch that becoming one can help make sure we can keep running now and into the future. As you can see from the above numbers, we’re very much a community-backed operation at this point. I’m confident that ad revenue will never again outpace supporter revenue.
Thank you again to everyone who reads this website. While the outside world has been noisy and chaotic, I’ve felt a comforting peace here in our corner of the internet. Our community is strong.
Please consider becoming a member so we can keep bringing you articles like this one.